Hi, welcome to my blog.
I'm so glad that you visited here as you told me after class ;-)

Yes, this piece is about how to improve your listening skill and is exemplified by the TOEIC listening section that you've been recently working on. It looks like your listening skill has been improved a lot thanks to your daily practice. Good job. When listening, try to visualize what you've heard as much as possible, OK? Keep up the good work.

I’m so certain that most of you have heard this ultra-optimistic trite bunkum; you’ll be able to acquire a native-like listening ability only by listening to whatever is spoken in English as if you were taking a shower! ..... If any of you have believed in this absolutely fishy-slushy spell, I strongly advise you to be wise enough to grow out of it. Here I submit my speculation which is yet to be empirically proven, but I believe some people might instinctively agree with. I’ve been thinking all these years that the listening comprehension skill is much harder to develop than widely believed. The rationale behind why I bluntly present such an audacious statement is that you cannot rely on textual information, but only on phonetic/auditory information, and need to develop “the ear” to catch and decode the phonetic input in order to comprehend what is being spoken. Plus, although this is obviously something unnecessary to be added, the listening comprehension has long been the least developed skill of mine while having kept achieving 495 on the TOEIC listening section for 6 or 7 years. See? TOEIC listening section is not at all a big deal.

Looking back at the times when I tried to achieve 495 on the listening section, I used to lose a piece of crucial information to answer questions or just be left behind in the speed or tempo of the listening materials, especially the ones in Part 3 and 4 due to my under-developed ability to process the phonetic/auditory information. Then I started listening to CNN news items by subscribing a monthly magazine, “CNN English Express”, hoping to enhance my language processing speed fully enough to catch up with spoken discourse in authentic settings. It turned out that I achieved 495 a month after I started studying with the magazine, and have kept achieving 495 since then. Disclaimer: As some of you already know, you can achieve 495 even if you’ve lost 3 or 4 questions out of 100 items in total. The reading section evaluates test-takers’ performance more severely allowing only a couple of incorrect answers or even “zero” for the perfect score.

Some say that you should listen to English without written scripts over and over until you finally grasp what has been spoken. I agree that it’s one good way to improve listening ability, but I also conceive that its efficacy and effectiveness fairly depends on whether the current level of a learner’s skill matches the chosen materials. For instance, if you catch only a few words in the listening material and do not identify the topic thereof, you’d better rely on textual information, i.e. written scripts. Read the scripts, check unfamiliar words and phrases, read the scripts aloud on your own, read them with the audio if available, and listen to the material one more time. In case that you succeed in identifying the topic but cannot follow some parts thereof, it's worth listening again and again until nothing new comes up to you. After several trials, you’d finally go for scripts to check your finalized comprehension. That is exactly what I did to “CNN English Express”. I kept doing this on train for months which greatly helped me acquire the language processing speed that I was seeking. For more advanced and motivated learners, scripts are no longer necessary or even get in the way of further developing their listening ability in a sense that it’s better for them to infer the lost parts and make up incomplete comprehension with what they have already learned such as grammatical knowledge or vocabulary.

If you need a quick and easy analogy to better understand what I’ve submitted above, here’s the thing. Listening to English without conscious attention and sedulous devotion, it’s just literally “taking a shower” which ends up holding no “water” in the bathtub. If you pay attention and devote yourself to trying to comprehend what is being spoken with clear objectives, whether with or without scripts, it will turn to be “filling water in the bathtub” which leaves you something educational in the end. My recommendation to you all is taking a “hot” bath every day until you get warmed up enough. That’s what I always do, and that's what I will keep doing. What do you do to your listening? Are you taking a shower or soaking in the bath to your heart’s content?

Hi, welcome to my blog.
I'm so glad that you visited here as you told me after class ;-)

Yes, this piece is about how to improve your listening skill and is exemplified by the TOEIC listening section that you've been recently working on. It looks like your listening skill has been improved a lot thanks to your daily practice. Good job. When listening, try to visualize what you've heard as much as possible, OK? Keep up the good work.